TWO UNIQUE SOULS
Steve Castro
So how did you find out that I cannot die?
“I can see forty years into various potential futures,
and the only potential future where I wasn’t murdered,
was the potential future when you found out
that I was pregnant with our daughter,
so I focused in on that future alone and followed its path.
I noticed that you lived through situations that no human being should have been able to survive, so the only possible explanation was that you couldn’t die.”
How many will there be?
“Eight, and they’ll be here in exactly five hours.”
How will they all die?
“You will kill each individual with their very own weapon.”
Do we have time to get you pregnant?
As she led me to the master bedroom, she said
“I bought us two first class one way tickets to
Anchorage, Alaska. We leave in eight hours.
We should be there trouble free for nine years,
eight months and three days.”
That’s good to hear, I thought,
that would shatter my old record,
when I was left undisturbed for
four years and twelve days.
“That would also be a new record for me,”
she told me as she was taking off the belt
that I had previously used to strangle
three would be lovers.
CARIDAD
Alex Hernandez
The first of his extensive Cuban family to be born in the United States, Alex Hernandez writes in a genre of his own making: Transhuman Mambo (also the title of his 2013 short story collection). Hernandez’s neologism is based on the popular coupling of a science fiction term with a musical form (space opera, cyberpunk) and describes quite accurately his combination of science fiction and Cuban culture. He was deeply influenced as a child by the work of Isaac Asimov, connecting in a personal way to this immigrant whose first language was also not English. While working as an administrator for the Miami Dade College Library, Hernandez has published a number of short stories in science fiction venues, including his story “A Thing with Soft Bonds” which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was included in Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler (2014). “Caridad” is the story of a girl who bears the burden of maintaining, supporting and unifying her large, cybernetically-linked family, possibly at the cost of her own identity.
Tomorrow, Cary Garcia-Martinez will die. She was drawing Ruth in a sexy pose on her bed, when she looked down at the blank outline of a female form reclining suggestively on the white of her notepad and the enormity of the realization hit her. She started to sob, her tears hitting the page loudly, making the blue ink from her copic marker splash and run. Ruth rushed to her side and pulled her close. Now they were both lying in bed, entangled in each other’s arms, surrounded by markers and sheets of paper crinkling as they moved.
Cary had known all her life that she would cease to exist on her eighteenth birthday, but the sudden arrival of the date — and the barely-started sketch of a girl — had rattled her with more force than she had expected. She clung to Ruth’s plump frame, gripping her like a life preserver, shivering with anger and dread and helplessness.
Ruth kissed her damp cheeks and long, thin nose, whispering some nonsense about “figuring out a way to beat this” as if this were simply some lethal disease that could be cured with punishing chemicals and harsh radiation. Her imminent demise wasn’t the result of a disease. No, it was something much more caustic — it was duty.
“We won’t,” Cary simpered and the pathetic, wet sound of her voice made her suddenly ashamed. She tried to get ahold of herself, sucking in deep, ragged breaths. She didn’t want to ruin the last few hours she had left wallowing in self-pity.
Ruth took Cary’s head in her hands and kissed her on the lips and looked straight into her brown, red-rimmed eyes. “We need to run away. Get as far away from your family as possible.”
Something protective stirred within Cary at the negative mention of her family. She sat up, crumpling the loose paper of false starts under her. She hated it when Ruth talked about her family, even if they were trying to erase her from existence. That last thought made the irritation dissipate and a crushing resignation settled within her. “There’s no place to run. Surveillance is just too damned tight with networked government employees sifting through and making sense of all the data collected. My family would find me in hours. Besides, where would I go? How would I live? We’d never get any work. No university would take me even if I could afford it without the Garcia-Martinez bank account.”
Ruth sat up to face her, the concern in her blue eyes was endearing and infuriating all at once. “You need to talk to them then. Tell them how you feel. Tell them that you don’t want this!”
Could it be that simple? Her mother would flip out immediately. She could hear her screaming and yelling already about how selfish Cary was, about how much they’d sacrificed for her, about betraying the family, crushing everyone’s hopes and dreams. What about her hopes and dreams, damn it? Her father would try to calm her mother down in that soothing voice of his and assure everyone that Cary was just getting cold feet, but in the end he would not entertain the possibility that his daughter, his pride and joy, would not be going through with the procedure. Los abuelos, los primos, las tías and los tíos would push and prod and lecture and encourage Cary until there was a tiny sliver of metal in her cerebral cortex, like a lodged bullet, and she would be gone forever. “They wouldn’t understand, or care what I want. Too many people would be screwed over if I backed out now.”
“This is crazy, Cary! You are being screwed over! Doesn’t that count? You can’t just go through with this! I can’t believe you’re actually even considering it?” Ruth’s pale face flushed and her cute freckles melted away into red. “This is some hive mind bullshit!”
Cary gently brushed a strand of sandy hair out of her friend’s brow then kissed her burning cheeks. “You don’t understand, Ruth. You’re una Americanita. You’re free and independent. You don’t even know your family outside of your parents — who don’t speak to each other—and one grandmother that lives two states away.”
“That’s racist!” her friend said without any real offense. Was it racist? She didn’t think so and, in Ruth’s case, it was true.
“My family is massive. All four generations are here, even the branches from Cuba and Venezuela and Spain have come for my birthday party—and to them, independence is pathology, self-reliance is shameful.” Too many times she’d heard her mom spit out the word autosuficiente like a curse. “The hive mind is how we’ve survived brutal Dictatorships and long exiles. We’re like fucking bees, but it’s a survival strategy that works.” Was she now defending the vile process that would kill her? How fucked up is that, Cary?
She shook her head violently, but the toxic mix of emotions remained. She was their appointed queen, after all, had been her entire life. They had spoiled her and groomed her since birth for this special responsibility and it had clearly done a number on her psyche. Everyone had pitched in to give her a wonderful childhood, with the certainty that when she turned eighteen and networked her brain to the entire family, she would pay them back tenfold.
Her father had always regaled her with stories of his high school friend, Cody Gonzalez, who became a professional baseball player and bootstrapped his entire family out of poverty. She was their Cody. Only this wasn’t baseball. The colloquial term in English was “to become a familiar.” With a minimally invasive procedure, she would become the Garcia-Martinez family’s familiar. Most Latinos though just referred to their familiar as Mi Hija, or Mi Nieta, Mi Sobrina or Mi Prima. You could hear the possessiveness in their voices. She knew that Asian and African families did something similar. The familiar is the member of the famil
y that represented them all, supported them, cared for them, protected them in this cruel, complex world, and bound them together even though politics and economics have scattered them apart. They wore the tacky headbands that constantly transmitted their thoughts to the familiar with pride, the way some people flaunted a brand-name purse or nice shoes or an expensive car. It said to everyone around them, “That’s right, bitches, this right here is a direct line to Mi Sobrina, and she’s voting in this year’s elections for us, or she bought this big house for us with her good job, or she won a Noble Prize in Physics!”
“But you won’t survive!” Ruth railed, snapping her out of her reverie. “Not really! You’ll become a statistical aggregate of all their thoughts, a human spreadsheet, a puppet shuffling around like Megan Choi at school when she’s on her meds! You won’t be Cary anymore.”
“I know!” Cary pushed Ruth away roughly. She loved this girl. They had everything in common; they gushed over the same books, obsessed over the same games, binged on the same Korean anime, liked the same music and movies, crushed on the same boys and girls, and recently started fooling around in bed. Cary wasn’t sure what that meant yet, if anything, but it made her sad that she would never get to find out. “I’ve always known! The problem is I never thought I’d like myself so much in the end.” My God, this was the end.
“Promise me you’ll talk to your parents. They can’t force you to put that thing in your head. That’s illegal. You have to be a consenting adult, right? So don’t consent.”
“It won’t make a difference.”
“But there will at least be a chance! If you don’t try, for sure you’re a goner. If you talk to them — cry, throw a tantrum — they might feel guilty and back off.”
Throw a tantrum? Cary had never thrown a tantrum in her entire life. Her family had always given her what she wanted and instead of making her a vapid, materialistic monster of a teenager, it actually had the opposite effect. She had become desensitized to stuff, it just wasn’t important to her. And what she did value, she was about to lose. “I’ll talk to them. I promise.”
“I’ll be there at your party, no matter what.”
“Can we stop talking about this? Just come here and snuggle with me because I’m scared shitless and you’re only freaking me out more.” She pulled Ruth back down to the bed.
“Is that all, just snuggle?”
“Yeah, it’s all I can manage right now.”
The house buzzed with activity. Her grandmothers, mother and about twelve aunts swarmed in and out of the kitchen, wiping and polishing everything until it shone like stainless steel. The men in her family were outside: mowing the lawn, hosing down the screened-in porch, and waging war on the aggressive bougainvillea, with its lipstick-colored flowers and perilous thorns, that had the audacity to grow a little too high or too far. And they set up la caja china, both coffin and barbeque, for the pork. Kids of all ages ran around screaming like maniacs. Their constant chatter, in three different Spanish accents as well as various degrees of English, rose above the four TV screens blaring the news or novelas throughout the house.
Ruth had left late last night and Cary was now paying for it, but the din mingling with the astringent, artificial lemon scent jolted her more fully wake. She wondered if this is what it would be like, their voices always chittering in her head like invisible insects on a balmy night. Would her own Miami accent, with its imperfections and superimposed English grammar, be reduced to something flat and boring and precise like the news anchors on TV?
An aunt, Tía Mari, grabbed her as she shambled down the hall and squeezed her tight. “Happy birthday! I’m so proud of you!”
Cary nodded and struggled lose. Everyone exploded with glee as she stepped into the family room, embracing her, congratulating her, praising her, wearing her down with words the way they rubbed at the grime on the furniture.
She went into the kitchen, picked out un pastelito de guayaba from the white box someone had gotten at the bakery early in the morning and dropped on the table. The harsh glare from the window hurt her eyes so she focused on her mom’s butt moving rhythmically back and forth. It was the only part of her sticking out of the oven. Cary opened her mouth to say something, announce that she wasn’t going to go through with the procedure, but with everyone around she felt outnumbered so she shoved the pastelito in her mouth and watched the bustle instead. And she chewed, working the gummy guava jelly out of her teeth, building up courage.
“Where’s Papi?” she mumbled when she could speak again.
“He went with Yovany to buy headbands for everyone,” her mom’s butt said, then the rest of the woman crawled backwards and reared its head. For an instant, it struck Cary how much she looked like her mother: milk chocolate skin, bouncy, curly hair, only Cary had her father’s prominent nose and almond-shaped eyes. “¡Que robo! Those things have gotten so expensive. You’d think that as the technology gets better, the prices would get cheaper.” She talked about the things as if they were nothing — phones or personal fabricators — not the devices that would turn her daughter into an automaton.
“I’m scared,” Cary whispered, when the last of her aunts scurried out of the kitchen hauling a large bottle of Clorox. Her mom didn’t acknowledge her statement, instead she wiped her brow, sighed heavily, and dived back into the oven. “I don’t know if I want this?” Cary continued, a little louder over the vigorous scrapping. The words coagulated in her throat like thick guava. “I don’t want to lose myself.”
Her mother, no longer able to ignore the topic emerged once more and — still on her knees — glared at Cary. “Aye, don’t be so dramatic! You’ll still be yourself, you’ll just be all of us too.”
She wasn’t sure if that was entirely true. Cary had read articles that questioned whether the familiar added to the dataset of experience or if they were just a hollowed-out receiver. “I don’t know if I want that.”
“What do you want, then?” her mother asked in a low hiss, as if she had already dismissed any answer to that question as utter foolishness. It was like the vague sex talk they’d had a few years back that had inexplicably blown up into a week-long fight.
“That’s the point,” Cary shrugged, trying to stay calm. “I haven’t figured myself out yet, and after today I never will.”
Her mother sucked through her teeth. Beads of sweat vibrated on her face with mounting anger. “Eso es la Americanita putting ideas in your head again!”
“No, these are my ideas!” The irony that it was, in fact, her entire family that were quite literally going to shove their ideas into her head escaped her mother entirely, of course. She always blamed Ruth. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while, reading up on what it means to be a familiar.”
Her mother threw her soapy sponge into a bucket, splashing dirty water on the already clean floor. “Mira, I don’t have time for this right now so let’s break this down, okay? What is it that you think you want to do with your life? Draw? Become an artist? A designer?” She nodded as if those were perfectly sensible options. “What school do you think you’ll be able to afford? And if you get loans, like your little American friends, you’ll be an indentured servant for the rest of your life. Also, there are no jobs out there! Don’t you watch the news? Ivan has a Civil Engineering degree from Venezuela, Yanexy was a Doctor in Cuba, Hector was in computers. They can’t get work! Y tu prima, Karen, did exactly what you’re considering right now, she took out an insane loan to get her law degree y que esta haciendo ahora? Putiando!”
Her mother always threw her cousin, Karen, in her face whenever they argued, but in her fury she failed to mention that some people were getting by. Xiomara was running a daycare out of her house, same as Lizet’s unlicensed hair salon, and Marcos was doing well with his insurance fraud.
“Why would anyone hire fifty different people, when they can hire one who’s smarter and who’s got more experience than fifty people? You know very well como están las cosas ahora! And to make matte
rs worse, there are no manufacturing or retail jobs anymore. The fabricators took care of that!”
Cary bottled up. She dropped the rest of her pastelito into the white cardboard box and laced her fingers. Her mother had always been the pragmatic one. She could cut down any squishy dream with a quick swipe of hard reason. Soon that particular skill would be hers; she would have all of their accumulated capabilities, she would be an engineer and a doctor and an under-the-table childcare provider, a beautician, a programmer, a lawyer and a kinda-sorta prostitute. All of their likes and dislikes would be buzzing in her head like worker bees, their opinions and beliefs…. And when confronted with any decision, big or small, her augmented brain would instantly average out all of the possible reactions and solutions streaming in from her family and come out with the statistical mean, which, according to the experts, would almost always be the correct response.
Her mom looked at her for a long time. She knew she had won the argument, but she didn’t radiate the usual smugness or sadness she did when defeating her stubborn daughter. She just looked very very busy, which scared Cary more. Things were barreling forward to their inevitable conclusion, and in a few hours the sterile citrusy smell would be replaced by the rich aroma of roasted pork, boiling black beans and yucca, the sizzle of fried plantains and the rest of her family—both blood relatives and married-in—would be drawn to her house like insects following pheromone trails.
“Please don’t bother your father with this,” her mother warned. “Y cuidadito con formando un show in front of the family when he comes to take you to the clinic.”
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